Earlier today (in this thread), I tried to help Stripysocks find a thread in MPSIMS called “the quote…unquote game.” However, after inputting this into the search box and clicking ‘go’, absolutely nothing happens. I don’t even get transferred to the “Your search is in progress and you will be taken to the results” page. I try searching “quote”, “unquote”, “game” and “quote unquote”, yet nothing happens.
So obviously I input other words and phrases and… they all work, no problems whatsoever. I type in words that are more common that ‘quote’ and ‘unquote’ and I get results.
Eventually I found the thread, but only by looking through my entire history.
So what’s going on? Any ideas?
I suggested an answer over in the MPSIMS thread, but to repeat it here: there’s a text file in vBB called #badwords. Its contents are not words banned by the board, as it might sound, but rather words that the search function won’t operate on. Contemplate results of a search for “that” or “been” for the reason why the file exists.
Now, every time anybody quotes another post or a cite, the word “quote” occurs between brackets in that file – and hence would show up in a search for text. So I strongly suspect that “quote” is one of the words in #badwords.
And if you do a search for a string that includes a word in #badwords, the search function simply ignores the word from #badwords, and produces results, if any, from the other word or words in your string.
Thanks Polycarp, that does indeed make sense. However, should this be happening when I input the word “game” ? Because that doesn’t seem to work for me either.